Outsourcing Welfare by Roy Germano, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Social welfare programs in wealthy countries serve two major functions: they buffer citizens from the vicissitudes of the market and personal setbacks, but they also serve an important political function. By reducing economic grievances, social welfare programs help temper public anger andprevent civil unrest. Global capitalism presents a particular danger to the stability of developing economies, but, as this book shows, such countries take a different approach to welfare, while achieving, more or less, the same aims as their wealthy neighbors. Rather than establish robust social welfare systems thatadequately cushion the blow of economic shifts, many developing country governments have retrenched. In the wake of the global financial crisis, they have cut fuel and food subsidies, re-targeting welfare programs to narrow sectors of society, reducing their health and pension obligations, andcutting public sector employment, all in an effort to meet the International Monetary Fund's debt-reduction guidelines. As a result, poor and middle income people in the developing world are paying more for basic goods and services. This book is about how remittances - the hundreds of billions of dollars international migrants send to family members in their home countries each year - are helping to fill this welfare gap and prevent civil unrest in developing countries. It argues that counting on expatriates to send money homehas become a de facto social welfare policy in many cash-strapped developing countries whose economic policies are guided by neoliberal orthodoxy. Looking particularly at Mexico, with supplemental cases in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the author finds that not only areremittance recipients in these regions less economically aggrieved, but also that they tended to give their governments higher marks for economic performance during the global food and financial crises. | Outsourcing Welfare by Roy Germano, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters